I don’t believe in hell in the literal sense. I do believe certain people live in a mental hell of their own creation, consumed by the hypocrisies and moral conflicts that they will not fix. The priest who molests children, the cop who shoots an innocent person, the list goes on. I believe these people, in their private introspective moments, live in a hell unimaginable.

But that’s not enough for me. There are certain people who need to suffer worse than that. They deserve the fire and brimstone that young children are taught to believe in. But it’s really a child’s tale cooked up to cover up the horrific truth that sometimes bad people win. Period.

I know a lot of people here have suffered terrible abuse, or been bullied, or unfairly targeted by society, government, or just assholes in general. Me personally, I haven’t been victimized, but I see it on a daily basis due to my job. Sometimes I wonder if that’s worse: to be an observer and unable to do anything.

World peace will never exist, unless everyone is turned into a mindless zombie. By the nature of survival, we all victimize others. I would be willing to burn in hell for my crimes, if I could watch those who deserve worse burn hotter. I want hell to exist, even if I’m next in line, just because it would be some indication that there is some sort of justice in the universe.

But so much for children’s tales.

Reality is the worst hell there is. Because it burns without rhyme or reason. And what could be worse than roasting all your life, never knowing your crime?

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I feel like I was condemned to suffer the vast majority of my life, but never told why. I sometimes wish I had done something horrible as a child or teenager so that I could at least understand the constant punishment life heaps on me.

The worst I did was look at porn and masturbate a lot. Hardly worthy of a miserable existence.

That is the least you can do wrong. Porn and masterbation is the end result of involuntary celibacy that many modern-day men need to battle with, thanks to the unobtainable hypergamous standards of most millennial women today. Just another nail in the coffin of how insignificant the human race is… I think the solution is to distrust everything. Stop believing in the human race. Distrust society. You are an alien in exile.
Doubt certainty, dance on the grave of the dead, eat an ice cream where others cry. Now this is just philosophical jargon but my magnum opus is: Dare to be different and give it for what it’s worth.
Laugh. Watch comedy. See the ridiculousness of existence itself. Become a philosophical existentialist, an unapologetic madman.

That’s a good strategy, but I think there’s a problem with the fck-the-human-race strategy. There’s an inherent hypocrisy because we’re human. So it’s like a Polynesian person saying he hates Polynesian people while continuing to live as a Polynesian citizen. (disclaimer: I don’t know the first thing about Polynesia, random example). Somewhere in the depths of your mind you’d realize this and begin hating yourself which creates another hellish conflict because, unless you kill yourself, you’re just being another example of what you find detestable. I think that’s why misanthropes always end up miserable. It’s tempting to feel superior to the human race by hating it (tried that, failed), but the bottom line is you’re just building up more hatred in yourself that will ultimately turn inward.

Exactly, that’s what’s so maddening. If I knew my “crimes” and understood why they were wrong, I would take my punishment. But it’s not knowing, or worse, being guilty of “crimes” which aren’t even bad. Porn, masturbation, getting occasionally drunk, or whatever acts that don’t hurt anyone, aren’t cause for being subjected to this hell. And meanwhile the real bad eggs just float through life happily. All I want is for this crap to make sense, then maybe I could accept it.

I don’t think punishment ever does much to help anyone. I mean, it might seem like a kind of justice, and might sate our own desire to see the objects of our contempt suffer, but what difference does that make in eternity? The wrongs are still wrong even if someone is paying for them.

Good point. You caught me. I’m not interested in justice so much as revenge against those who ruin this world. This could open up a completely separate discussion on criminal justice and the roles of prisons (reform or revenge)? Ideally with criminals as well as bad souls, I think their sentence should be to fix the problems they created. Once all the victims/families are genuinely happy and able to move forward, the criminal is freed with a clean slate. But in what kind of ideal world (or existence) will that ever happen.

If someone has the idea that it might work better that way, it could happen in a possible future. That’s how brains work – we get ideas and then realize them in practice. Mostly just to test them out. Ideas like this, or like punitive justice both fall far short of the ideal. Everything does. I guess the carceral state helps reinforce divisions in society by pitting groups against each other and driving fear of the other, as well as helping to enrich the people running the private prisons. It’s mutated into a strange monster and I doubt anyone but an investment manager could be happy with the state of it. But punitive justice is what it is, whether we’re talking about Hell or Riker’s Island.

You’re so right about that. Even if we could figure out best way to deal with wrongdoers, we wouldn’t be able to implement it. I think society knows this, and so we tend to treat prisons as trash cans and convicts are trash. That may be the case in some instances. But it’s an awfully wide brush to paint so many people.

And scaling it up to our discussion of hell (as a prison that we depressed folks are stuck in) suddenly it sucks to think we’re just trash thrown here at the discretion of a higher power, or a random accounting error that dumped us here.

In my most buddhist moments (haha), I feel like this cosmic hell/prison is designed for rehabilitation, not just punishment. We’re supposed to figure out why we feel so conflicted, why we fall into destructive cycles, and only by breaking out of those cycles can we ascend to the next level (get out of jail free card). But then I look at the disaster that is my life, the miserable lives of others, and the hopeless stagnation of this whole thing, and that’s when I throw spiritualism and philosophy and hope out the window and just say: we’re fucked.

We’re no more fucked than anyone else is. The whole transcendence thing is about gaining a perspective of yourself as just one point in an ocean of perception. We’re all stuck on this stupid ball of dirt, a bunch of dumb primates – to steal a line from Storks, a bunch of babies that learned to talk. No one better or worse than the others until someone decides to make it that way. Whenever I want to know who I really am, outside the distorted perspective I have of who I think I am, I just ask my cats. They never learned to talk so I can trust what they have to say.

It’s totally understandable, coming from a certain perspective, to want the world to be just and fair. And a large element of our culture is about fostering that instinct – the villain gets their comeuppance, and the righteous hero gets their reward. If the world is ultimately just, then you can protect yourself from unbearable suffering by avoiding wrongdoing. And you don’t have to be too concerned with the suffering of others…either they bought it upon themselves, or justice will prevail and make them whole in the end.

Ultimately, I don’t think anyone ‘wins’. Bad people die. Good people die. Sometimes those ends seem poetically just, but mostly they’re just obscure and random. Everyone dies, and the struggle to perpetuate genetic code just rolls on. As you clearly recognize, suffering is not reliably linked to moral decency. Instead, it correlates with sensitivity and adverse life experience, which are random products of the evolutionary process.

I would say that I’ve probably suffered in ways most haven’t, as a result of my own acts in life. I wouldn’t say it was hellish exactly, because I imagine hell as something you would go to any lengths to escape in your desperation, and I have never made an attempt. Rather than fire or brimstone, I would say it was more empty, hollow, numbing. There is something mentally tortuous about it, the recognition that something can’t be made fully right, or wiped clean. There’s a constant low-level anxiety, which one attempts to numb. It’s not the constant terror and panic that I’d associate with hell. There are still flashes of light, glimpses of beauty, moments of connection. But part of you always pulls back from it, saying ‘that’s not for you.’

So not hell, but not really living either. Perhaps purgatory, or some lesser realm of undead suffering. An open prison, where your invisible chains inhibit your every move. But I’m not sure how much that differs from the standard experience of depression by someone more ‘morally sound.’

If biblical hell really existed, then I’m sure I’d be a candidate. And some abstract part of me would want that, for the worst to happen, so ‘justice’ could somehow be done. But a larger part of me would want to understand. A God that creates, and then judges and punishes his creation? How were we to be other than he made us? Could things have really turned out any different? Was all of this evil and suffering not integral to the design?

Failing some revelation that somehow exculpates the arbitrariness of it all, I think what I would mainly want is an end to the suffering. Not hell, not endless torment, not ‘justice’. But an end. Either through transformation into some other kind of consciousness, that could exist freely without being so tainted by past actions, or instant destruction of a self that cannot be healed. It might ultimately amount to the same thing.

For those worse than me – the genuine psychopaths, sociopaths, murderers, serial rapists, genocidal dictators etc…again, not really. The idea of another being suffering, regardless of what they’ve done, brings me no existential satisfaction. I believe that people act as they do for a reason, ultimately rooted in the nature of the universe. I don’t see how inflicting suffering on them after the fact serves any other need than revenge – and the satisfaction of revenge is fleeting, compared to an eternity of torment.

I would simply like such people not to be capable of inflicting such suffering anymore. Either to be separated from others, or morally transformed, or to be given the gift of a peaceful end if there is no way for them to exist with or escape the evil within them.

It may be that my judgement in this is biased by being morally compromised myself, and that as a result I’m no longer capable of viewing others with the appropriate level of moral outrage. But that’s kind of how I see it. Some people are motivated to inflict great suffering on others. Those motivations have their roots in the interaction of biology and environment, and ultimately the physical processes of this universe, stretching back in a potentially endless chain of cause and effect. Recognizing that, it seems preferable to attempt to reduce the amount of suffering that we experience, and that we inflict on others, wherever possible.